What Is llms.txt and Does Your Website Need One?

llms.txt is a plain-text file, placed at the root of your website (yoursite.com/llms.txt), that gives AI tools a short, structured summary of what your business does — written for a machine to parse quickly, rather than a human to browse.

What it looks like

It's Markdown, not code — a business name, a one-line description, then short sections listing services, key pages, and contact details. Think of it as the elevator pitch you'd give a very literal-minded assistant that has thirty seconds to understand your business before answering someone's question about it. This site's own llms.txt is a working example.

Does it actually work yet?

Honestly: it's an emerging convention, not a universal standard yet — not every AI crawler reads it, and none has confirmed it's a ranking factor the way, say, a sitemap is for traditional search. What it reliably does today: it gives any AI tool that does check for it a clean, unambiguous summary instead of having to infer your business from marketing copy, which reduces the odds of it getting basic facts wrong. It costs almost nothing to add and there's no real downside — it's a small, honest bet on where things are heading, not a guaranteed lever.

How to get one

You can write one by hand in a few minutes — name, description, services, contact — or generate one automatically. Every website we build includes a drafted llms.txt from day one, and it's one of the checks in our free scan, so you can see immediately whether your current site has one at all.